Pants of Fire: Rule no 324 of Mommyhood: Some lies are OK!

Lies are an essential part of being a Mommy. No matter how hard you try or how much you tell yourself that you will be 100% truthful with your child, you end up lying. Not cold calculated lies but little white lies to make your life simpler. No matter how careful you are, you slip. Its one of the rules to mothehood. You lie and its OK!

Here is my list of blatant white lies I’ve knows to say without so much as a twitch in my face,

If you don’t finish your food, Peppa Pig will be so sad. Peppa Pig is a cartoon. Pegga Pig knows only what the cartoonist/animator wants her to know. Z can skip all the lunches in the world and Peppa will not know. She just won’t care.

When you sleep you grow bigger. I don’t know. I have no documented proof of this. But I do know that when he sleeps, my sanity is restored albeit briefly.

You are hurting me. Z can try all he wants but that little hands cannot hurt me. I am physically bigger and stronger but when he starts to raise his hands at me, I know I have to stem it before it spills over to his friends, and always a Z, you are hurting me does the trick. That is his freeze line. I can say that and he will drop what he does.

We are all out of TV. Z tends to get carried away watching TV. I give him limited TV time each day but he does everything in his powers to stretch the minutes. Simply switching off the TV might bring on a full on tantrum and so I have to discreetly change the channel first to a blank screen and then throw my hands in the air and dramatically exclaim, “I think we are all out of TV”. That he accepts.

Hmmmm..Yummy (accompanied by a pat on the tummy) Spinach puree as for that matter, veggie purees are NEVER yum. Never!

Daddy will be back in 5 minutes. Daddy never is. Daddy goes to work ahead of us on most mornings and so excusing Daddy for a quick 5 minute outing is the only way to prevent a full on tear explosion.

No! Cockroaches bite. Ok, I know I am being mean here but I hate those little creatures and he loves them. This way, I am hoping he wont bring one into the house.

and rounding up the list, something I heard quite often growing up but haven’t yet used on Z.

Salt makes you stupid. When I was little, I had great affinity for salt. Mr Salt shaker and I used to disappear under tables, under the bed, inside the closet, under covers etc where I used to feast on his saltiness. When my Mum found about this, she ruined my relationship by telling me about the kid who was very very smart when she was born but became increasingly stupid by the minute because she used to sneak off everywhere and eat salt. Needless to say, it put the brakes on our passionate relationship.

I don’t know how many so called ‘parenting rules’, I’ve broken as a result of these above mentioned lies but it sure does restore peace and harmony in my household.

The Hungry Beggar

 

Indian mothers never save their kid an after school snack, they save them after school meals. Growing up, I always had 4 meals. There was breakfast, which was most often gobbled in a hurry to attempt to catch the school bus, the school lunch which was spent in mindless gossip where more hands than mine dipped into my lunch box, the home lunch which was the after school meal my Mum would save me and then the big family dinner.

Being a lover of food, I enjoyed all my meals immensely but it was only the after school meal that bored me out of my wits. Mum would always save me a big bowl of rice and veggies and curries and sometimes some fried fish too. It was supposed to feed my growing body. My horizontally growing body, that is. The cliche that Mums are blind to the shortcomings in their offsprings is true and couldn’t be truer in my case for at a time when I could do with the skipping of a meal or two, I was being fed an extra meal of carbs with a little bit of veggies thrown in.  Being the good daughter that I was, I ate it all without so much as a whimper. Just kidding, I loved it. I still do. Carbs and saturated fats speak to me at a personal level.

Anyways, this one meal was the one I dreaded the most cause it was the only time a meal seemed like a chore to me. Sitting down at the dining table on my own with a mount of rice to conquer was a daunting task. It was less to do with the food and more about the lack of company. I was bored and that boredom was affecting my affection towards the meal.

One day I was mindlessly trudging through my meal when a King in all his glory appeared before me. When I say King, please get the Royal Family’s image out of your head. I am talking about the Indian kings, in all their finery and grandeur. Decked in ornaments from head to toe as if to reinstate his kingship. He smiled at me and said “Eat”. I looked down and saw that I had transformed and so had my settings. I was sitting on the floor of what appeared to be the walkway to the king’s castle. My clothes were in tatters and I was covered in filth. I had evidently not seen the inside of a shower in ages. I suddenly felt ‘hungry’ very very hungry which was strange cause I had rarely felt this emotion until now. I looked in front of me and there sat the most beautiful bowl of rice, veggies, curry and some fried fish. Never had that bowl of food looked as appetizing as it did now. I looked up at the King who was smiling at me and coaxing me to eat. The word had hardly left his mouth when I began to stuff my face. It was pandemonium. More rice was flying off my face than finding its way into my tummy. I literally had a rice facial. The need to eat it all at that very instant was so strong that it became the sole purpose of my existence. The more I ate, the more I wanted to eat. My vision got cloudy as a bits of curried rice stuck to my eyelashes. I still had food left in my bowl but I’d been hungry for so long that I went after the food sprayed around the bowl. I was eating off the street, lest a stray dog gets it before me. I ate it all with an urgency I had never felt in my 10 years of existence and I felt full. I looked up to thank the generous King but he had long since disappeared. I looked around and I was back in my uniform, back at my dining table. I was looked messy with curry stains on my shirt and rice in my hair. The dining table looked like a war field and an overturned glass of water only added to the effect. It was easily the best meal I had ever had.

Soon this turned into a routine. On somedays, I was a social activist, protesting against some injustice by fasting unto death and then being force fed by the military cause the government could not let me win and on others I was a freak show, a girl who could eat forever. My favourite role however has been that of the hungry beggar, a role I’ve reprised on countless occasions.

Years later I still find myself breaking into impromptu scenarios, be it while waiting for a taxi or while alone in the kitchen. It just makes life a little more dramatic.

Pic courtesy: ichabilal.wordpress.com